How to Bury a Building

I'm from Haifa, but it took me a long time - and an architecture degree - to really see the city I grew up in. On a daily commute, I kept passing the ruined façade of the same abandoned building: an early-1920s cigarette factory of unknown architect, built and once run by three Arab businessmen - Hajj Taher Karaman, Hassan Dick, and Farah Salti. During the British Mandate it was an active, thriving business. Today it stands gutted, one of dozens of derelict structures scattered across the same stretch of the Lower City - each holding a fragment of a story that is also the story of three families who lost everything in 1948.

Haifa's history reads as a sequence of peaks and collapses. Ottoman rule left a small town that grew, was destroyed, and was rebuilt more than once. Under the British Mandate the city became a cosmopolitan port - a new railway, a large harbor, a booming industrial belt - and, alongside it, a genuinely unique modernist architecture: functionalist buildings shaped jointly by émigré Jewish architects and local Arab builders and craftsmen, reaching a richness found nowhere else. The declaration of the state in 1948 brought the opposite: a wave of demolitions tore through Arab homes, public buildings, and places of worship across the Lower City, leaving behind a torn urban fabric and, at its center, islands of ruin.

In recent years, Haifa's planning department has added a small number of surviving buildings to an official heritage list. Homemade signs - clearly not put up by the municipality - have started appearing on some of them, announcing their protected status to passers-by: a paradox in itself. Preservation in Haifa is mostly blocked by economics, and underneath the economics, I could also feel a political reluctance to engage with this specific history. So a “heritage-listed” building here mostly just means a building left standing exactly as it is - an aging white elephant, on a good day eventually restored, and on an ordinary day quietly left to decay, or erased and buried outright. Even where the landscape looks green and pleasant today, it's often just this - a demolished neighborhood in disguise: one more of what Israeli conservation architect Amnon Bar-Or calls spaces of embarrassment - places where, the moment you enter them, you can tell something is wrong.

The intervention site sits in Haifa Bay, in a neighborhood called Kibbutz Galuyot, part of the historic Lower City, next to Halisa and Tel Amal and directly across from the new central business district currently planned for the area. It covers about 90 dunams (9 hectares) and holds roughly 50 existing structures - six of which the municipality has added to its heritage list. Alongside them stands an intact stretch of urban fabric built in the early 1930s: a row of historic stone houses with distinctive arches and ironwork, most now empty or in poor repair, with only a handful of families still living among them.

Physically, the site sits right on the seam between the mountain and the coastal plain, giving it a real topographic slope that makes it hard to move through, and hemming it in on three sides with major roads that cut it off from the surrounding fabric entirely - an urban enclave in the middle of the city. Its many open green spaces aren't really parks; they're the leftover, unbuilt scraps of a demolished neighborhood - more of Bar-Or's spaces of embarrassment in landscaped disguise. Socio-economically this is one of Haifa's poorer areas, and the physical neglect and crumbling infrastructure show it: the site's unusually high concentration of abandoned buildings has become fertile ground for crime.

Modern development tends to solve the problem of an old building by replacing it, rather than reusing or reinforcing what already exists - and every act of new construction leaves behind its own trail of waste. This project treats that waste as the material of preservation, rather than its opposite. Instead of restoring the factory and its neighboring structures, I propose burying them - deliberately, visibly - beneath a mega-structure built from the site's own future construction waste. Concrete rubble that would otherwise be trucked to the new CBD site and landfilled is instead collected, crushed, mixed into a concrete aggregate, and cast as the material of the new ground itself.

Looking for the right formal language for this new layer, I turned to geology rather than architecture - studying how stone naturally forms, fractures, and meets other stone. Geological terms translate surprisingly well into the vocabulary of preservation: burying an old layer beneath a new one is really just building a new superposition, in the geological sense of the word - which is also how the project ended up named, half in earnest, half as a provocation: an act of architectural burial.